"Commentary from P.M. Carpenter"

October 25, 2016

Trump’s refusal at last week’s debate to say that he would respect the results of the election [was] a violation of the indispensable notion of the peaceful transfer of power [writes Dana Milbank].

But on MSNBC’s "Morning Joe" the next morning, the process journalists had a different view. "It’s the revenge of the elites," Mark Halperin of Bloomberg Politics said. "Elites do not accept that that was an appropriate answer."

Host Joe Scarborough agreed that the issue was only of concern to "people in newsrooms … with their soy lattes."

Halperin (Harvard ’87) went on to say that "normal people won’t care about that answer."

I also missed this, or rather, these:

In March, Halperin declared on "Morning Joe" that Trump is "one of the two most talented presidential candidates any of us have covered." In January, also on "Morning Joe," he said Trump’s attacks on the Clintons were "politically brilliant."

In June on his Bloomberg TV show, "With All Due Respect," Halperin asserted that "it’s not racial" for Trump to attempt to disqualify an Indiana-born federal judge as a "Mexican" because of his ancestry. His reason: "Mexico isn’t a race."

There's more. And I shall repeat what Milbank does not: Halperin (Harvard '87).

MSNBC now airs two daytime programs which I simply cannot abide: "Morning Joe" and "With All Due Respect," both of which have a common thread — the pathetically unraveled, anally puckered, unjournalistically processed Mark Halperin.

The media — much of it — is indeed rigged against the GOP. I give you the Washington Post's excellent Catherine Rampell:

If Republicans truly want to save the Republican Party, they need to go to war with right-wing media. That is, they need to dismantle the media machine persuading their base to believe completely bonkers, bigoted garbage.

It is, after all, the right-wing radio, TV and Internet fever swamps that have gotten them into this mess, that have led to massive misinformation, disinformation and cynicism among Republican voters. And draining those fever swamps is the only way to get them out of it….

Trump is not some black swan, whose unique cocktail of charisma, telegenicism and political fluidity landed him the nomination. His nomination is the product of years of race-baiting, conspiracy-theorizing, expert-delegitimizing right-wing media nonsense, which Republican politicians aided and abetted because it seemed politically expedient at the time. They helped the alt-right create the alternate reality that made a Trump nomination inevitable.

And unless the party establishment grapples with its own complicity in misinforming, misleading and frightening the masses, it’s doomed to field more Donald Trumps in the future.

Rampell's is equally excellent advice, although of its serviceability, I'm in doubt. Right-wing media is both of, and outside of, the realm of organizational Republicanism. Were party leaders to assault, as Rampell urges, "the paranoid, destructive excesses of right-wing media — not just Fox News’s headliners such as Sean Hannity, but also Breitbart, Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones," the assaulted, like the Borg, would only gain in strength. They thrive on "elitist" persecution, which, in their impenetrable bubble, is how all well-meaning criticism is labeled.

For GOP leaders, theirs is a hell from which there is, most likely, no escape.

Sean Spicer, the RNC's chief strategist and propaganda minister, appeared about an hour ago in a dizzying CNN interview.

He's "feeling good," he said, which, at long last, tells us how a man headed to his own hanging feels. Things for Trump, he continued, are looking "electorially" swell (even veteran political operatives somehow manage to butcher this simple adverb), public polls are all skewed — whew! — and Republicans' ground game is superb, second to none. All is well.

I was impressed, for I don't know how he does it — being so upbeat and cheerful, that is, in the face of certain doom. In my book his Trump-delusionism is second only to that of Boris Epshteyn and Kellyanne Conway, the latter of whom I dearly hope accompanies me to my Judgment Day interview (assuming I'm not hastily dispatched elsewhere). On the pre-negotiated take, before St. Peter she'll convert all my worldly transgressions into acts of absolute virtue.

If not Kellyanne, I'll take any other Republican hack as my eternal advocate. These folks are truly awesome in their obliviousness to reality. Nothing fazes them, they never quit, and by God they come across as authentic. They could dizzy the Lord Himself.

This morning David Brooks, in a paroxysm of "election-related anxiety," warns us about the perils of election-related anxiety, which, he says, "is coursing through American society." Woe to the anguished who believe "the destructive character" of our national anxiety stems from only one side. No, our deep disquiet is "led by two candidates who arouse gargantuan anxieties, fear and hatred in their opponents." This — conservative intellectualism's both-sides-are-to-blame narrative — Brooks gets out of the way early, so that he can hie to convulsions of hand-wringing angst, which, tellingly enough, have to do in the rest of his column with Trump only.

Brooks is a very sad man, whose superior sensitivity to political degradations puts me to shame. I must be in large part a wretchedly indifferent bastard, for I see Trumpism as but the age-old surrealism of the far right. I worry more about the left's recent unpleasantness — its susceptibility to crackpot demagogic appeals. If both sides become enmeshed in ideological platitudes of the wholly unachievable, we really will have problems.

That said, having spiraled into election-related anxiety, Brooks seems to catch himself at the end of his column. "This campaign will soon be over," he writes, "and governing, thank God, will soon return," he fantasizes. Nonetheless, it's what comes betwixt Brooks' open and close that intrigues, such as this: "David French wrote a shocking essay for National Review describing the appalling online abuse he suffered because of his anti-Trump stance. His anonymous assailants Photoshopped pictures of his daughter’s face in a gas chamber and left GIFs of grisly executions on his wife’s blog."

That of course transcends the far right's surrealism; it exposes, instead, its diseased underbelly. To the best of my recollection, we here at PMC's Commentary have never been haunted by the violently Trumpist. But you should take a look sometime at my Facebook page, which I myself do only when duty calls, as it did this morning. The right-wing pathology expressed therein — most often in CAPS and multiple exclamation points!!!! — is both unsettling and comforting. What follows (in reaction to my post yesterday on Hillary Clinton's presidential legitimacy) courses not "through American society." It courses only through the devoted Trumpian mind, which dwells in a decided minority:

*We won't last anytime with hillarys open boarders how many Muslim refugees are you going to pay for. [I love it: I assume those Muslim refugees will be the "boarders"?]

*Half the country has already deemed a Clinton presidency illegitimate. We the People will never allow ourselves to be governed by a criminal felon. This woman is unqualified, because of her obvious crimes, to be our president and we intend to ensure, if elected, she is reminded daily of that fact!

*VOTER suppression WILL NOT WORK THIS TIME !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!AMERICA FIRST !!!! VOTE TRUMP EARLY MAKE SURE YOUR VOTE GETS HEARD , CAST AND COUNTED !!!! EARLY VOTING HAS BEGUN TELL A FRIEND NO LINES . ONLY PATRIOTS CAN MAKE AMERICA GREAT again !!! VOTE TRUMP NOW [this commenter appears to be a trifle confused as to what "voter suppression means]

*Thank God Trump is ahead with 63% of the vote so far. America could never survive 4 more years of this crap…. Hillary is a Nazi socialist that has already started several wars, has assassinated world leaders, and has almost every country in the world opposing her and supporting Trump. Have you missed WikiLeaks? The entire world is saying America is 1930s Germany with Obama and Hillary sharing the role of Hitler. Wake up!!! America is finished if Hillary wins.

And anyone who disagrees, says another commenter, "is another typical uninformed liberal lunatic!!"

Just what, I ask, is unique about these comments? That is, what about them is peculiar to 2016, and to the forewarned, impending calamity of Clinton's Nazi socialism? Nothing, nothing at all is the answer. The adventurous are free to revisit identical remarks left in countless online comment sections and in fringe newspapers of 2012, 2008, 2004, and on back to 1936 — when FDR was deep into destroying capitalist America by saving it. Today's Trumpeteering comments reflect only the unhinged convictions of a chronically unhinged minority. Though I grant that they are appalling, in their actual numbers they're also comforting.

I'm toying with the idea of ignoring these hoary buffoons post-election, for they are, as President Eisenhower observed in a private 1954 letter, a "negligible" and "stupid" lot. But I fear my numbers might suffer. For though deserving of neglect they are, they can be awfully entertaining. Indeed, I really should visit my own FB page more often, where I can learn, comfortingly, that left-wing VOTER suppression WILL NOT WORK THIS TIME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

October 24, 2016

Just four years ago, Donald Trump took a drastically different position on what is now his central issue: deporting undocumented immigrants in the United States….

Asked [by CNBC] about his views on immigrant labor, Trump said, "You know my views on it and I'm not necessarily, I think I'm probably down the middle on that also. Because I also understand how, as an example, you have people in this country for 20 years, they've done a great job, they've done wonderfully, they've gone to school, they've gotten good marks, they're productive — now we're supposed to send them out of the country, I don't believe in that.... I don't believe in a lot things that are being said."

That final line characterizes the politician Trump in toto. He is the perfectly malleable man — a wholly unprincipled cipher who doesn't believe in a lot of things that are being said by him. The wholesale absence of principles is a common but not indispensable feature of the political demagogue, and here, Trump is more Joe McCarthy than Huey Long, who at least had some sympathy for the Everyman. For Trump, the Everyman is just another mark, for whom I too would have sympathy, if only he weren't so willfully blind to the bloody conspicuous con artistry of Donald Trump.

Honestly, I'm not sure how I'll go on after 8 November. This horror of a Republican nominee writes himself — and the idea of my having to put original, post-Trump thought into a post has become an intimidating future. There's a real world at there, somewhere, and I'll need to comment on it. Will I be capable, after 17 months of Planet Trump? I tremble.

Then again, I'll always have Paul Ryan, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and the entire, otherworldly Republican caucus to make me feel right at home.

As Trump has plummeted in the polls, more conventional Republicans who thought they could get away with supporting him have tried to pretend that Trump and his message were foisted on them from some distant planet.

On Thursday in Florida, President Obama called the GOP’s bluff. "Trump didn’t come out of nowhere," he declared. "For years, Republican politicians and far-right media outlets had just been pumping out all kinds of toxic, crazy stuff…. Donald Trump didn’t start all this. Like he usually does, he just slapped his name on it, took credit for it, and promoted the heck out of it."

Obama catalogued the craziness he had in mind: the "birther thing," climate change as "a Chinese hoax," and claims that "I’m about to steal everybody’s guns in the middle of the night and declare martial law, but somehow I still need a teleprompter to finish a sentence."

I just love it when Obama takes to amused ridicule, and, in my book, his last observation is the funniest. As has been frequently noted — though I also can't help noting it again — for eight years Republicans have stumbled along on two propagandistic tracks: Obama is the inexhaustibly cunning tyrant who's hellbent on FEMA/Pol Pot reeducation camps; Obama is, as well, an insufferable incompetent who has disgraced presidential efficacy, not to mention the reputation of dictatorial rule.

This two-track, "intellectual" disharmony brings to mind F. S. Fitzgerald's oft-quoted epigram — and just how wrong it was: "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."

Krugman posits a vastly probable truth: "[President Clinton] will face an opposing party that demonizes her and denies her legitimacy no matter how large her margin of victory."

For this, there is of course recent precedent. Despite President Obama's popular-vote victories in both 2008 and 2012 (52.9 percent and 51.1 percent, respectively), as well as his decisive Electoral College victories (365 and 332), his congressional opposition made a demonizing camp of "the loyal opposition" not seen since John Quincy Adams' rather pathetically stillborn, one-term tenure. In the eyes of modern Republicans, presidential "legitimacy" carries a partisan label — and it don't start widda D. (An aside: I recently referred to the American political system as the "healthiest" of world democracies, for which I caught proper flak, here and elsewhere. Entirely my error. What I meant but didn't write was historically healthy, for these things always pass — and these things include modern Republicans' mindless obstructionism and presidential delegitimization.)

For conclusive evidence of the GOP's partisan legitimacy, one need only look to Obama's predecessor. Bush Junior first failed to achieve a popular-vote victory (47.9 percent) and his Electoral College conquest (a quite illegitimate 271) was among the slimmest in modern presidential history. Nonetheless, any questions as to W.'s legitimacy were to be put aside, said Republicans (and Democrats), for the good of the nation. Junior's 2004 election reflected a popular-vote victory (50.7 percent) less than Obama's two and much less (286) then the latter's Electoral College scores, and about this we heard that George W. Bush possessed a glittering mandate. Clinton's imminent Electoral College victory in the high 300s or 400+ will, naturally, be dismissed by Republicans as an outlier. And any Clintonian talk of a mandate will go with it.

Which brings me to the point of this post. In explicitly striving for a massive popular-vote advantage (mirrored in the Electoral College) so as to defeat any Trumpian talk of a "rigged election," the Clinton camp is itself setting another bad precedent. For a presidential win is a presidential win — even W.'s first. In 1992, Hillary's husband won with 43 percent; Kennedy, with 49.7; Truman, with 49.5. Notwithstanding Republican disgruntlement with these outcomes, the American electorate deemed each of these newly elected presidents as wholly legitimate. Kennedy's 49.7 percent was as good as Reagan's 59.8 percent in 1984, or Johnson's 61.1 percent 20 years prior. This was as it should have been.

The Clinton camp, however, is declaratively seeking a decisive victory so as to deflate any post-election gibberish about electoral chicanery. This is an ill-advised proposition, for it plays right into Trump's hands — and severely muddles the heretofore unquestioned concept of "a presidential win is a presidential win." Going forward, is the electorate to deem a presidential victory "legitimate" only if the victor achieves a landslide? Will only Electoral College votes of 400+ or thereabouts be accepted as indisputable evidence of the popular will? Are popular-vote pluralities — so common in American political history (Lincoln's, in 1860, was 39.9 precent) — to be regarded by the body politic as merely reputed victories?

I don't like this Clinton-camp talk of an electoral landslide as a necessary legitimization of Hillary's presidency. I don't like it at all. Fuck Trump — and all his talk of a close election as a rigged election. A win is a win.

October 23, 2016

I'll give credit to Douthat for boundless creativity. In one of the finest pieces of sophistry I have ever read, this morning he attempts the vastly impossible; he labors, without overtly putting Clinton on a par with Trump, to put Clinton on a par with Trump. His is a magnificent piece of polemics and obfuscation, as well as furtive but blind partisanship. It is clever beyond the assessment it deserves, which is to say, his column renders me almost speechless in reaction.

Douthat's objective is to leave one sputtering in a mass of condemnatory conflation. He carefully fuses Clintonian "folly" into Trumpian psychosis, damning the latter while subtly heaving the former into near equivalence. He acknowledges Trump's political insanity for what it is, but then meticulously portrays Clinton's conventional politics as an intolerable evil. In brief, Douthat's is an assault on all American politics — a somewhat depraved, brilliantly unhinged, populist cri de coeur that has contributed so mightily to the phenomenon we know as Trumpism, which, again, Douthat claims to condemn.

His opening is a closing summation:

A vote for Trump makes a long list of worst cases — the Western alliance system’s unraveling, a cycle of domestic radicalization, an accidental economic meltdown, a civilian-military crisis — more likely than with any normal administration.

Indeed, Trump and his supporters almost admit as much. "We’ve tried sane, now let’s try crazy," is basically his campaign’s working motto…. Some of his more eloquent supporters have analogized a vote for Trump to storming the cockpit of a hijacked plane, with the likelihood of a plane crash entirely factored in. But passing on the plane-crash candidate doesn’t mean ignoring the dangers of his rival.

They’re the dangers of elite groupthink, of Beltway power worship, of a cult of presidential action in the service of dubious ideals. They’re the dangers of a recklessness and radicalism that doesn’t recognize itself as either, because it’s convinced that if an idea is mainstream and commonplace among the great and good then it cannot possibly be folly.

One of Douthat's essentially twofold denunciations of Clinton is that of her erstwhile support of the Iraq war (which, by the way, Douthat himself supported). This is but part of Clinton's dangerous political conventionalism, notes Douthat. That I agreed with him, time and again, in 2008 is on the record. Still, something gnawed at this incriminating critique, and that something was historically and, dare I say it, pragmatically based: Even that paladin of American virtues, Abe Lincoln, once noted that if you wish to succeed in American politics, never ever oppose an American war — which, to his acute detriment and regret, he had done during the Southwest's Great Theft.

Douthat also blames Clinton and, more broadly, Center Left & Friends for the financial crisis — "the policies that helped inflate and pop the bubble were embraced by both wings of the political establishment." Both, but — and this Douthat omits — not equally both. That notwithstanding, Douthat also ignores the enormous political pressures brought to bear — by reigning Reaganism, Gingrichism and Bushism — on "conventional" politicians of saner persuasions. The columnist wishes to blame center-left Democrats for Republican policies demagogically hustled over 30 to 40 years. Could all Democrats have fearlessly opposed those policies? You bet. And they would have done it out of office. This, I needn't remind you, is not the nature of conventional political beasts.

In only one passage, however, does Douthat unleash his core polemical objective: "One can look at Trump himself and see too much danger of still-deeper disaster ... while also looking at Hillary Clinton and seeing a woman whose record embodies the tendencies that gave rise to Trumpism in the first place."

There you have it. Don't blame my years of populist rabble-rousing and tea-partying madness, says Douthat, for the inevitable horror that is Trump. Blame, instead, the conventional, establishmentarian politics of Hillary Clinton — which, of course, is precisely the attitude that gave rise to Trumpism in the first place. And so it goes: another conservative intellectual's refusal to accept personal responsibility for, as noted, the horror that is Trump.

October 22, 2016

By [2004], most of the smart money had given up on Trump. To get a new personal credit line, he could no longer rely on handshake deals or personal guarantees with Chase Manhattan, as he once had. Instead, financial records obtained by Newsweek show, in 2003 he turned to the Cayman Islands’ branch of UBS, the Swiss bank. For that loan, however, he had to put up a large number of assets as security, including a portion of his interest in Trump World Tower, all of his investments in a Paine Webber brokerage account, mortgage notes and numerous other securities and property. Soon almost all financial institutions were passing on his deals, other than Deutsche Bank—and in a few years, he would default on a $640 million construction loan from it. The stock and bond markets, where every investor who had ever placed faith in Trump lost money, were closed to him…. Wall Street and financial institutions worldwide all knew that, as a businessman, Trump was a disaster.

So Trump went in another direction, rebuilding his reputation on television. Beginning in 2004, around when his public company fell into bankruptcy, Trump began playing the role of a successful businessman on the NBC reality show The Apprentice. Unless it read the financial news religiously, the public could not know that this portrayal of Trump was a farce.

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

— I Corinthians 13:11

Would that Republican crackpots did. Spake Texas governor Grew Abbott 10 months ago: "Leaders of the other party are against efforts to crack down on voter fraud. The fact is that voter fraud is rampant." We all know the reasoned retort, which, this morning, and for the umpteenth time, the NYT offers up: "A study by Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who currently works in the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, uncovered only 31 credible claims of voter impersonation between 2000 and 2014, out of one billion ballots that were cast."

Nothing, however, stops Republican crackpots from hurling accusations of voter fraud, or, more broadly, election rigging. At their core, the accusations are indeed childish; they are the stuff of "And your mama," springing from Republicans' brazen theft of Florida in 2000. Says election law professor Richard Hasen: Trump’s Abbottlike charge "did not come out of thin air. It is, in fact, an often-repeated theme by those on the right who have been claiming, especially since 2000, that Democrats are stealing elections with voter fraud." Whenever Republicans accuse Democrats of … whatever … you may rest assured that the former are guilty as Satan of same.

In the NYT's analysis of largely absent election shenanigans, there is also this rather charitable observation: "The possibility that fraud or incompetence could change the outcome of a close presidential contest, as some claim happened when John F. Kennedy took the White House on the strength of an 8,000-vote margin in Illinois, is at least conceivable, experts say." Some claim? A less generous and more accurate wording would be that every Internet-haunting, right-wing crackpot insists that Kennedy stole the election from Nixon.

Gov. Abbott's voter fraud was positively rampant in Cook County, they say, and therein lay Kennedy's overall national theft. Sadly, and as always, the crackpots can't add or subtract. Moving Illinois to Nixon's column would still have resulted in a Kennedy Electoral College total of 276. What's more, academic studies of the Illinois vote have concluded that though voter fraud there likely was, it wasn't enough to turn the state's decision. Even more than that, Nixon had stolen votes downstate, which would have substantially offset Mayor Daley's Chicago thefts, as well as been a bit embarrassing — when the Republican theft was exposed — for the outraged Nixon camp.

On occasion some right-winging crackpots are sharp-witted enough to note that Texas also went Democratic in 1960, and, they further note, only because of voter fraud (though this has never been proven). So what if Kennedy didn't out-steal Illinois, they say; by God, he and Lyndon sure stole Texas. Here, regrettably, the crackpots' poor arithmetical skills once again kick in. Move Texas to Nixon's column and one is still left with a Kennedy victory of 279.

The poor dears, they not only speak as a child, they add and subtract like a preschooler.

For the rest of us, the larger lesson to be learned (or, rather, reminded of) here is that right wingers never lose elections. Democrats steal them. Synonymously speaking, the crackpot mind is endowed with heroic virtues which are simply, electorally, unimaginably indefeasible — unless of course it imagines all manner of voter-fraud bugaboos from the immeasurably wicked enemy camp. And unto them a virtuous Son has been born — a son of New York.

If Trump is trounced by Hillary Clinton on Nov. 8, many believe he’ll turn his wrath — and his millions of loyal followers — against Ryan as he runs for reelection as Speaker. Trump already appears to be looking for ways to explain his potential loss in the White House race.

Go ahead, Mr. Speaker, stick to your kind endorsement of Trump — and see what thanks you get.

I will not vote for Hillary Clinton. But, as I’ve explained in these columns, I could never vote for Donald Trump.

The only question is whose name I’m going to write in. With Albert Schweitzer doubly unavailable (noncitizen, dead), I’m down to Paul Ryan or Ben Sasse. Two weeks to decide.

Among Charles Krauthammer's articulated reasons for rejecting Clinton is that she once "complain[ed] that her speechwriters have not given her any overall theme or rationale. Isn’t that the candidate’s job?" Such is the custom, yes. These, however, are peculiar times, thanks to the Republican Party — now headed by the relentlessly obstructionist Paul Ryan, he of Krauthammerian preference.

Clinton has almost heroically (in this demagogic age, some would say foolishly) noted on the campaign trail that she doesn't wish to make promises she can't keep. Ryan's obstructionist party pretty much nullifies even the most rudimentary of political promises. Thus, true to her word, Clinton has minimized her political objectives. She may be displeased that hired wordsmiths haven't contrived some magical means to rhetorically gussy up the coming trench warfare of, say, lifting debt ceilings as a splendid, "overall theme" of her presidency. The wordsmiths' failure, however, is an unfolding of mere honesty.

There remained one last institution of American politics that Donald J. Trump had yet to vulgarize: the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner, which the NYT describes as "a presidential campaign ritual of levity and feigned warmth." Last night, as with everything else Trump has touched, even that light-hearted, Catholic-charities event turned to shit.

I wasn't going to watch. For 16 months now, this hideous little man of beerhall politics has systematically degraded the oldest and healthiest of world democracies. He has single-handedly administered the coup de grâce to this nation's second-oldest political party. He has attacked the defenseless and assaulted the weak. He has encouraged mass violence, praised tyrants, reduced policy to a punchline, and converted the pathologically bewildered to a homegrown national socialism. The singular glory of Trump's political career is that he was always destined to get his ass kicked — an inevitability that is now only 18 days away.

So why subject myself to this doomed, hideous little man's "comedy routine" at the Al Smith Dinner? He'll soon be gone. For mental-health reasons, Trump-avoidance has become my watchword. But I did watch. I blame my masochistic relapse on a Packers-Bears commercial break, upon whose commencement I foolishly flipped to CNN. And there, of course, to a chorus of boos, was this hideous little man characteristically turning the once-light-hearted, Catholic-charities event to shit.

I needn't repeat his Goebbelsesque "jokes," which, in fact, amounted to only one. And that one, naturally, came at the expense of an innocent woman — his wife. Otherwise, Trump horrified the New York audience by launching into his usual, fascist-rally tastelessness: Hillary Clinton is "corrupt"; Hillary Clinton pilfered Haiti earthquake funds; Hillary Clinton was at the dinner "pretending not to hate Catholics." On reflection, strike my paragraphical lead-in. It was probably Martin Bormann's grandson who wrote those "jokes." Joe was funnier.

Thus did Donald J. Trump vulgarize the one, theretofore-unmolested institution of American politics — the congenial Al Smith Dinner, a "presidential campaign ritual." (The one truly humorous moment of the evening came when Hillary ridiculed Rudy Giuliani for having called The Donald a "genius." I have never seen such a scowling, stone-set face in reaction. But what did I expect? Members of brownshirted gangs aren't known for their sense of humor.)

So, to repeat, no Trumpian vulgarization has been left undone. And the words of President Obama are worth repeating as well: Trump "is not a joking matter." Obama was speaking specifically yesterday about the charlatan's vulgar "suggestion" of a rigged election "without a shred of evidence" — "the first major party nominee in American history" to do so — and yet that is but one example among many of the transcendent harm this hideous little man is doing to the traditional political system I, you, Obama, and every sane American loves.

It is to be hoped the harm is as temporary as it is prodigious. Indeed I, for one, am confident of that. My confidence, however, doesn't write coming history. Trump has vulgarized, disgraced and debauched the finest political system ever known to humanity. This hideous little man is just that, and what I trust is Trump's inevitable and dispositive end, 18 days from now, cannot come soon enough. With every passing day, he vulgarizes American politics a bit more — and though he is doomed, with the smallest of successes, the lowest of bars have a way of lingering.

The NYT's David Leonhardt notes that throughout the four presidential and vice-presidential debates, questions were posed on subjects ranging from the Syrian civil war to Clinton's "look" and Trump's tweets — but not one question was asked by any of the moderators about climate change.

This he labels "a failure of journalism."

The failure is also a true oddity, which I won't pretend to understand. Stalking humanity is perhaps the gravest danger since the Black Death, and Hillary Clinton's "look" (whatever that means) supersedes it in journalistic importance.

There is nothing else left to say (although that won't stop me). Last night was also the last little flicker of Trump's magic lamp; the finishing bamboozlement of a dying party; the closing and dimmest breach of respectable American politics since the demagogic rot of antebellum Democrats. No fat lady need sing on November 8th, for last night's operatic tragicomedy was dispositive.

As during the first debate, I was, for the first half-hour or so, borderline terrified that Trump would be somewhat coherent throughout. He hammered his antitrade hocus-pocus and build-a-wall flimflammery and thus equally hammered Clinton. It seemed as though he came to debate, rather than act the off-message clown that he is. That his trade and immigration policies are, as Mr. Biden would say, malarkey is a matter of insignificance. To millions of voters they're quite coherent and convincingly "tough." Trump was on a message-intensive roll, and so I dreaded the imminent upticks in polling and the media's inevitable, ensuing cries of "We have a close race again, folks."

Trump being Trump, however, he soon unraveled in a romper room of message-blunting infantilism and colossal puerility. Hillary was by turns "wrong, wrong, wrong" and a "nasty woman"; her world-class charitable foundation was a "criminal enterprise"; Trump "did not" ridicule the women whom he had repeatedly ridiculed on tape. All this, and more, only re-revealed the temperament of a sleep-deprived toddler. And all this was more than enough to keep Trump's polling in the upper 30s. But then came the grandkiddie of all imbecilities — those 14 little words of dismissing a game at which he was losing.

"I will look at it at the time. I will keep you in suspense."

What suspense? He (again) gave away the ending.

I'm so sorry to say that I didn't hear his democracy-trashing live. It seems it was raining two counties away so the weather bureau twice cut into the "debate" with two-minute alarms about the possible end of the world. At any rate, these absences were rewarded with network commentators' post-debate horror, which, it further seems, was previously and instantly invoked by Hillary. "That’s horrifying,' she said. "He is denigrating — he is talking down our democracy. And I am appalled that someone who is the nominee of one of our two major parties would take that position."

That's nothing, though, compared to the appalling reality that Donald Trump is the major party's nominee. Was it shocking — or "breathtaking," as the Washington Post's editorial board frames it this morning — that this infantile clown again refused to endorse democracy's upcoming verdict? Of course not. This was but another tantrum of the toddler Trump, who has never exceeded the political unseriousness of his developmentally arrested followers.

And so Trump & Friends flickers out, the GOP dies, and a fresh Lost Cause is born unto the walking dead.

October 19, 2016

I confess, I was starting to wonder about what the real Hillary Clinton — the one you never get to see behind closed doors — really stood for. But now that, thanks to WikiLeaks, I’ve had a chance to peruse her speeches to Goldman Sachs and other banks, I am more convinced than ever she can be the president America needs today.

Seriously, those speeches are great! They show someone with a vision, a pragmatic approach to getting things done and a healthy instinct for balancing the need to strengthen our social safety nets with unleashing America’s business class to create the growth required to sustain social programs….

The way Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have made trade and globalization dirty words is ridiculous. Globalization and trade have helped to bring more people out of poverty in the last 50 years than at any other time in history….

When I read WikiHillary, I hear a smart, pragmatic, center-left politician who will be inclined to work with both the business community and Republicans to keep America tilted toward trade expansion, entrepreneurship and global integration, while redoubling efforts to cushion workers from the downsides of these policies.

And when I read WikiHillary, I hear a smart, center-left politician whose pragmatic policies Republican pols will trash (quite incongruently, in some cases), only because they come from Hillary Clinton — just as they did to Barack Obama.